Twitter gets interesting

Something very interesting has happened in the last few days with Twitter.

Being in marketing, but relatively new to the whole social media thing, I’ve been mostly staying in the background on Twitter — following interesting people. Most of them have been friends and people I met at marketing conferences. Part of it was because I wanted to figure out how to use Twitter for my job, and I couldn’t really see the value of it. Part of it was because I really disliked using Twitter, although now that I’m using TweetDeck it’s at least tolerable.

But what really changed for me was that I started talking about stuff I cared about. I got involved with a few marketing discussions. I threw out a music discussion question that was really bugging me. I stopped trying to start the conversation and just started doing it.

It’s just like how you never find romance till you stop looking for it. Or you can’t play the piano well until you stop thinking about it. There must be something in human nature where others can tell when you’re being desperate instead of genuine; when the real you isn’t coming through.

Now that I’ve put that into words, of course, I’ll start thinking about it again, and it’ll take another 6 months before I can recapture that ingenuity again. But I now know why The Rules of Using Twitter In Marketing are so hard to define and even harder to monetize.